Please fill in Nominee Manila Critics Circle Award These beautiful and poignant stories evoke a complex and empathetic picture of the Philippines. They reveal characters trapped in the extremity of urban violence or the crushing poverty of the provinces. The reader comes away with new insight into human nature and the valor and courage of the Philippine people. copy

The first signed literature in the world is on cuneiform tablets written in 2350 BCE in Sumeria, and it is by a woman. Dr. Cass Dalglish translated the cuneiform of Enheduanna. She was a powerful Sumerian prince in 2350 BCE and her work, Nin-me-sar-ra, begged the god Inanna (who was the first to enter the underworld and return from the dead) for help overcoming an usurper. Adopting a jazz aesthetic, Dalglish improvises on her translations; re-examining the cuneiform through feminist lenses. Enheduanna is not just any writer, she is the first identifiable poet to sign her writing. Lyrically translated from the original cuneiform by Cass Dalglish, the relevance of Enheduanna’s Song to Inanna echoes across millennia as a testament to the timeless power of women’s literature. Giving fresh interpretations to the originals, these poems form rhythmic riffs—like jazz musical improvisations—that carry the reader back to the lands of ancient Iraq during the time when gods were women.

Raising the Tents follows one woman as she plumbs her depths, and retrieves her own voice on her journey to find meaning and wholeness. Adler’s personal mythology evolves from a belief in the possibility for change and from a Jewish heritage emphasizing ancestry. She explores the silencing of women and reveals the empowering effects of finding and claiming our voices. In remembering pogroms and the Holocaust, and her childhood in an alcoholic home, she bears witness against “a world malnourished by its insistence on dominance as a way of life.”

Poetry. Asian Studies. This moving, rich cycle of linked poems journeys from Cambodia's ancient mythic times to the killing fields and to the UN presence during Cambodia's first free elections. It bears witness to the plight of the Cambodian people and to all who have endured holocausts. The reader viscerally experiences the sweet-sour tastes of both jungle fruits and blackened, dead potato patches; the sights and sounds of the bombed Cambodian countryside and its fecund cities--as well as the humanity of others and ourselves.